1. Technical Field
This disclosure relates to a circuit board, a semiconductor package comprising the circuit board, and methods of fabricating the circuit board and the semiconductor package. More particularly, this disclosure relates to a circuit board including bonding pads for flip chip bonding, a semiconductor package comprising the circuit board, and methods of fabricating the circuit board and the semiconductor package.
2. Description of the Related Art
As the operational speed of integrated circuit chips and the number of input and output pins are increasing, conventional wire bonding technology has reached its limit. Accordingly, to replace the wire bonding technology, flip chip technology is being developed. In the flip chip technology, conductive studs are formed on chip pads of a semiconductor chip and the semiconductor chip is mounted on a circuit board using the conductive studs. Specifically, the conductive studs are electrically connected to bonding pads formed on the circuit board, respectively.
In the flip chip technology, in order to electrically connect the conductive studs to the bonding pads reliably, a very thick, high quality metal finish layer may preferably be formed on the bonding pads. The metal finish layer can be formed using an electroless plating method or an electroplating method. However, the electroless plating method is generally not used because the expense of forming the thick metal finish layer using the electroless plating method is comparatively high.
Accordingly, the metal finish layer is typically formed by using an electroplating method, and in this case, a plating line that is electrically connected to all of the bonding pads needs to be formed.
However, after the semiconductor package is completed, the plating line may operate as an electrically open stub toward a path through which electrical signals are transmitted, and may thereby distort the signals being transmitted.